"“War/Dance,” in spite of its slickness, is an honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance in an African tribal culture. The competition in the capital city, Kampala, is obviously much more than an entertaining talent show. Through music, dance and drumming, the children transmute fear and pain into profoundly cathartic spiritual affirmation.
These ancestral dances are connected to their homeland and their tribal roots (they are members of the Acholi tribe) and ultimately to their core identity. When they perform the Bwola, the tribe’s intricate, 500-year-old royal dance, you feel its ritual power healing broken lives.
The children are victims of a 20-year civil war that has cost tens of thousands of lives in northern Uganda which the movie, to its detriment, barely mentions and about which it supplies no historical background. Many were abducted from their villages in the middle of the night by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that turned kidnapped boys as young as 5 into soldiers and girls into sexual slaves. Many were snatched in front of their parents, and some were forced at gunpoint to beat and kill family members and neighbors.
The movie focuses on three children from the Patongo camp who make the long journey to Kampala in 2005 in trucks guarded by security forces: Rose, a 13-year-old choir singer who witnessed her parents’ murder by the rebels; Nancy, a 14-year-old dancer who took charge of her three younger siblings after her father’s killing and her mother’s abduction; and Dominic, a 14-year-old former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose passion is playing the xylophone.
It is the first time that children from the Patongo camp have qualified for the competition, in which more than 20,000 Ugandan schools compete, and expectations of their success are low. In the refugee camp 60,000 people live in squalid, cramped quarters without electricity or running water, and many suffer from malnutrition and disease. Because they come from a war-torn area where resources are scarce, they are looked down on by their southern rivals, who know that many were forced by the Lord’s Resistance Army to commit atrocities." -http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/movies/09ward.html
Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2saj4gJ4Lvw
Website:
http://www.wardancethemovie.com/
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